THE REPORT FROM WASHINGTON

Kill the welfare state!

Ellis Washington is a former staff editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at the Rutherford Institute. He is a professor of Constitutional Law, Legal Ethics, and Contracts at the National Paralegal College, a counselor at the American College of Education, and a founding board member of Salt and Light Global. Washington is a co-host of "Joshua's Trial," a radio show of Christian conservative thought. A graduate of John Marshall Law School and post-grad work at Harvard Law School, his latest law review article is titled, "Social Darwinism in Nazi Family and Inheritance Law." Washington’s latest book is a 2-volume collection of essays and Socratic dialogues – "The Progressive Revolution" (University Press of America, 2013). Visit his popular law/political blog, "EllisWashingtonReport.com, an essential repository dedicated to educating the next generation of young conservative intellectuals.

The republic will cease to exist when Government takes from those who are industrious and gives to those who refuse to work.

~ Thomas Jefferson

As one reads the history of the Old Testament kings of Israel, particularly 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles, there is a diabolical refrain rooted in human nature that echoes through these pages … and through the Ages:

And Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully after the LORD, as did David his father.

~ 1 Kings 11:6

When studying the Kingdom Period of ancient Israel, I find many striking similarities with the history of America and how we failed to preserve our beloved republic – allowing it to be perverted by secularists, progressives and liberals and devolve into a pathetic, socialist welfare state.

God repeatedly had to judge Israel for being like the other pagan nations and falling into Baal worship. If Baal worship was the Trojan horse of ancient times that repeatedly caused Israel to fall into apostasy, then surely the welfare state is the killer of republics in modern times and will lead to the destruction of Europe and America.

Baal worship = State worship; Idolatry = Statolatry.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45) masterly exploited the national angst when the stock market collapsed in October 1929, which precipitated the Great Depression. FDR easily defeated then-President Herbert Hoover, a progressive Republican, and used existential tragedies as a pretext to make himself into a transformative president like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. FDR’s New Deal sought to deconstruct America from a moral-based republic grounded on biblical precepts of Natural Law into a European-style socialist welfare state based on envy, corruption, crony capitalism, racialism and what Leon Trotsky called “perpetual revolution.”

Before FDR, the church and moral-based charitable organizations had helped the poor through voluntary Christian charity without state initiation or state control. FDR lusted after power above all else and took his cue from Chief Justice John Marshall’s aphorism: “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” Sensing a national mandate, FDR created a veritable alphabet soup of unprecedented entitlement programs and new bureaucracies designed to annihilate American exceptionalism and keep the Democrats in power into perpetuity.

FDR knew that his New Deal was wholly unconstitutional; therefore, in 1937, he initiated his infamous Supreme Court Packing Plan. To make his New Deal programs pass constitutional muster, FDR threatened to pack the Court with six more justices hand-picked by him. Fearing a diminishment of their power, SCOTUS caved in, deemed FDR’s New Deal programs to be constitutional (“A switch in time saves 9”), and America has been paying for the sin of socialism to this day.

FDR beguiled us all and turned legalized thievery into art form under the Marxist guise of “redistribution of wealth,” fair-share egalitarianism and social justice. Under the National Socialism of Hitler’s Nazis, which existed concurrently with the administration of FDR, people would fondly remember: “At least he [Hitler] made the trains run on time” (a phrase also applied to Italy’s Mussolini). Likewise, decades after FDR’s New Deal, people would fondly recall, “Every man had a job.” True, but America made a Faustian deal with the devil to get jobs, to get cradle-to-grave welfare. FDR’s New Deal cost America our collective dignity, our freedom, our inalienable rights … our souls.

Ted Sonnier in a blog entry, “Why Jefferson was right,” said: “The money that people earn ‘fair and square’ is taken from them unfairly. This is the problem inherent [in] welfare programs. It is also the first chip out of the foundation of the republic. The next chip is the dependency on bigger and bigger government and the mindset that only the government can fix problems that come with this federal assistance, leading to even larger, overbearing and inefficient government interference and the steady loss of liberty.”

Indeed, because America didn’t learn her lesson from the evils of the welfare state under FDR and LBJ, a certified socialist like Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. Consequently Obama openly refers to his administration as “FDR, part II.”

America’s solution? Just like God had to purge Baal worship from ancient Israel and Judah by pain, war, societal chaos and ultimately by Assyrian captivity (722 B.C.) and Babylonian captivity (586 B.C.), so must America must purge FDR’s diabolical New Deal and welfare-state policies by returning to our founding principles rooted in God, federalism, Natural Law, biblical theism, constitutionalism, liberty and Veritas (truth).

Jefferson, like the great prophets of antiquity, foretold the treason this generation would grapple with when he stated: The republic will cease to exist when Government takes from those who are industrious [workers] and gives to those who refuse to work [leeches]. A recent poll confirmed this fact in that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay any federal income tax.

All of President Obama’s policies, like those of FDR, seek to destroy America from within as a pretext to comprehensively remake the republic into a servile, Marxist welfare state.

The welfare state cannot be “reformed,” but every aspect of it must be identified, rooted out and systematically destroyed. All congressional legislation and policy objectives by the Republicans from hence forth must amount to the deconstruction of the liberal welfare state. If we achieve this feat, then over time the Democratic Party will concurrently be destroyed and deservedly transformed into the Whig Party of the 21st century.

I wish British intellectual George McDonald was referring to the welfare state when he eloquently intoned, Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!